Diane Gow McDilda - The Everything Green Living Book: Easy ways to conserve energy, protect your familys health, and help save the environment

For more than a century, conservationists have spent time striving to save the world. They have written letters, marched, protested, and even celebrated in pursuit of that cause. For twenty years, I've worked for The Nature Conservancy, whose mission is to preserve the world's plants, animals, and natural communities. We save great places to protect nature and preserve life. Yet after all the acres saved, species protected, laws passed, and regulations enacted, something more is needed to save our planet. In short, people need to have a conservation ethic: to care about the environment and know what they can do about it. That is why this book, The Everything Green Living Book, is so important; it helps instill that conservation ethic and shows us how to live accordingly.

The expression Think globally, act locally describes an effective approach to conservation, but it could be improved to include individual actions people can take to live more lightly on the earth. To me, acting locally to preserve the environment means neighborhood cleanup projects, recycling activities, and community gardens. In this book, Diane McDilda guides people to the next step of making their personal lives more environmentally friendly. She describes everyday actions that each individual can take to preserve our planet and its amazing natural resources. Thus, a new expression might be to dream globally, join in locally, act personally because it conveys the idea that people need to visualize a greener world, participate in community improvement activities, and make their own lives compatible with a healthy environment.

The timing is just right for The Everything Green Living Book. People are starting to realize that caring about the environment is not just a once-per-year activity on Earth Day; nor is it a mom and apple pie idealism that is quickly forgotten when they make choices about consumer products, home improvements, transportation, and political candidates. Caring for the environment needs to be an integral part of everyday life.

In recent years I have questioned Earth Day and our schools' environmental education because after almost forty Earth Days and millions of students becoming adults, we should have more to show for it. Sure, the air and water are cleaner, yet the earth is warming, resources are being depleted, species face extinction, and in politics and business, the environment consistently comes after other concerns. But, as people are becoming more aware of global warming and its human causes, they want to do things in their own lives to address the problem. They are beginning to realize that a new and widely held conservation ethic will move us to the next phase of saving our planet.